Huston´s hummingbird

Huston Smith is a "soft" Traditionalist and perennialist who is mostly known for his book "The World´s Religions", a best seller in its day which was also widely used as a school textbook in the United States. "Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World´s Religions" (first published in 1976) has been marketed as a sequel to "The World´s Religions" (at least in its 1992 incarnation), but is really nothing of the kind. Rather, it´s Huston Smith´s personal statement of belief. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but as a good perennialist, Smith of course claims that his take on Traditionalism is the hidden kernel of all religions. 

"Forgotten Truth" comes across as a peculiar combination of standard Trinitarian Christianity and Advaita Vedanta (or something close to it). Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Platonism and Native American spirituality are also referenced. Without attribution, there are a few borrowings from Theosophy. It´s almost fascinating how seamlessly the author navigates the diverse religious landscape as if it were a unified whole. Of course, he also quotes various Traditionalist writers. The book contains an appendix with the very 1970´s title "The Psychedelic Evidence", discussing Stanislav Grof´s research into LSD as evidence for the objective reality of the soul and the spiritual realm. (It´s a public secret of sorts that Smith was a buddy of Aldous Huxley and probably "tripped" together with him.) Incidentally, this isn´t necessarily intended as criticism. While "Forgotten Truth" is hard to read, it´s also quite interesting...

Summarizing Huston Smith´s points is hard, but much of the book revolves around a criticism of modern science, scientism and something the author calls "prevolution" (progress + evolution). Smith is careful not to repudiate modernity in toto - he believes that the abolition of slavery is a good thing, for instance - but he clearly believes that the modern West have lost something very fundamental when it broke with "tradition" and embraced a fully materialist worldview. It´s time for us to "rejoin the rest of humanity". In the same vein, Smith is careful not to idealize premodern society (although he does have a soft spot for Muhammad and the Muslim empires, but also for Paleolithic hunters and gatherers). What he wants restored isn´t so much the social structures of premodernity, but the mystical religion and the idea that humanity is part of a much vaster cosmos than the physical one, a cosmos crowned by God and Infinity. That´s our true destiny.

In Smith´s theology, both the personal god of theism and the "impersonal" spirit of certain forms of Hinduism are equally real. The Infinite is higher than the personal god, but on his own level, God is equally real. One thing that surprised me when reading the book is Smith´s strong emphasis on bhakti and the love of a personal god, and also the idea that God reciprocates by loving the devotee. Indeed, all love ultimately comes from God, the devotee simply giving God´s love back to him. I had assumed that Smith was more into the Infinite end of things. However, the author believes that there isn´t any contradiction. The mystical unity with the Infinite Spirit necessarily goes through loving devotion of an anthropomorphic deity, since love breaks down the barrier between the lover and the beloved, and hence creates a "unity" already on this level. I assume this is the perspective of some Hindu schools, but I have never seen it spelled out this clearly before.

The weakest part of "Forgotten Truth" is Smith´s rejection of evolution, and he even predicts that most readers will find his musings on the topic downright crazy. Well, he´s right. This is where Smith writes that animals are incarnations of eternal archetypes which simply dropped down from heaven ready made, without any prior evolutionary development. The hummingbird is the Platonic form of a bird pretending to be a butterfly! Er, wut? Since Smith is an "old earth creationist", he is locked in the same contradiction as his evangelical Christian counterparts: why do the Platonic forms drop down from the deep blue sky in a rough evolutionary sequence? At one point, Smith dares to go further, suggesting that perhaps degeneration is present in the fossil series in the form of "prehuman" forms which are really "posthuman". This is probably taken from the Theosophical speculation that apes are degenerate humans, rather than evolutionary cousins of our ancestors. 

Smith freely admits that his non-belief in progress will be just as hard to accept for the modern reader as Gurdjieff´s statement that the Moon eats people. This may have been true in Space Age 1976 and even more in 1992 (when Fukuyama won the Cold War). Today, it´s the easiest part to believe! What´s harder is Brother Huston´s insistence that there is hope, a transcendetal hope to be sure, and that somehow our earthly sufferings will all prove to be a necessary part of a larger perfection...